How can the public be persuaded to accept vaccine passports?

LSE Covid 19 Blog: How can the public be persuaded to accept vaccine passports?                                      Page 1 of 4

 How can the public be persuaded to accept vaccine
 passports?
 Vaccine passports can be unpopular. Researchers from Bocconi, LSE and Yale carried out two experiments to
 explore how governments could persuade people of their merits.

 Once called “the next political flashpoint” in the COVID culture wars, vaccine passports continue to spark
 controversy in the United States and worldwide. These ‘passports’ are electronic or paper vaccination certificates
 that allow vaccinated people to do certain things that the unvaccinated can’t. Some of them are “international”. For
 example, the European Commission has reached an agreement on the “Digital COVID Certificate”, which will
 provide proof that a person has been vaccinated against COVID, received a negative test result, or recently
 recovered from the virus. Others are “domestic”: some countries like Israel, Chile and France go as far as requiring
 proof of vaccination to take part in ordinary activities like attending shows or even circulating freely during general
 lockdowns.

 If polarisation around the pandemic is bad enough, polarisation around vaccine passports is worse. Remember
 what happened with contact tracing apps: once presented as key to return to some kind of normalcy, they were
 ultimately doomed because people didn’t trust them. Vaccine passports could suffer the same fate. Although more
 coercive than contact tracing apps, their success ultimately depends on public support and cooperation. Imposing
 them on a sceptical public could trigger resistance, induce forgery, or even – as some preliminary research
 suggests – increase vaccine hesitancy. If vaccine passports are to be introduced at all, they had better enjoy public
 support.

                 Photo: Giovanni Maggiora via a CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence

 We conducted two experiments to test whether some well-known behavioural tools could be used to increase
 support for passports while not decreasing vaccine uptake, nor furthering polarisation. Our results are heartening
 and suggest these techniques could be used to nudge people into other socially beneficial behaviours, while
 keeping polarisation at bay.

 In our first experiment, we leveraged the status quo bias (that is, the tendency people have towards accepting a
 situation once it is framed as being the status quo rather than a change). In fact, immunity passports can easily be
 presented as not that much of a new idea. To travel to certain countries one has to show a yellow card – a World
 Health Organization-sponsored proof of vaccination against yellow fever. Domestic restrictions for the unvaccinated
 are also not radically innovative: schools and universities – even the most libertarian among them! – routinely ask
 for a list of mandatory vaccines to be on campus.

Date originally posted: 2021-07-19
Permalink: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/covid19/2021/07/19/how-can-the-public-be-persuaded-to-accept-vaccine-passports/
Blog homepage: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/covid19/

LSE Covid 19 Blog: How can the public be persuaded to accept vaccine passports?                                      Page 2 of 4

 We ran two parallel survey experiments, one for the “international” passport and one for the “domestic” one (each
 with approximately 1,600 US American residents, recruited through Prolific.co in a non-representative sample). We
 randomly assigned half of respondents in each category to a control group and to a “status quo” group. To each
 control group, we explained the Covid Pass policy. To each status quo group, in addition, we showed that the
 passport was not a novel idea, using the examples of the yellow card and of universities respectively.

 Figure 1: The explanation of the COVID Pass, with the yellow card example

 Figure 2: The explanation of the COVID Pass, with the universities example

Date originally posted: 2021-07-19
Permalink: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/covid19/2021/07/19/how-can-the-public-be-persuaded-to-accept-vaccine-passports/
Blog homepage: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/covid19/

LSE Covid 19 Blog: How can the public be persuaded to accept vaccine passports?                                      Page 3 of 4

Date originally posted: 2021-07-19
Permalink: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/covid19/2021/07/19/how-can-the-public-be-persuaded-to-accept-vaccine-passports/
Blog homepage: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/covid19/

LSE Covid 19 Blog: How can the public be persuaded to accept vaccine passports?                                      Page 4 of 4

 All the results were in the direction we anticipated. In both cases, the status quo group showed higher support for
 the pass than the control group. Furthermore, the status quo group stated a higher willingness to vaccinate than the
 control group. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, the status quo treatment seems to have reduced polarisation
 between Democrats and Republicans (defined as the distance between their respective opinions towards the
 passport). This reduction seems to have worked mostly through softening conservatives’ opposition, which is
 consistent with the literature. The decrease was larger for the domestic pass, which could be explained by the fact
 that the treatment made explicit that both conservative and liberal institutions have required immunisation proof in
 the past. All our results are robust to a battery of controls and significant to the 1%.

 In our second experiment, we built on the (quite incipient) literature on interaction among nudges to test whether
 two nudges could work together – or whether, as some authors suggest, they would “crowd each other out,” making
 them ineffective or even counterproductive. Again, we ran a survey experiment with 4,000 US residents, this time
 focusing only on international passports. We divided respondents evenly into four groups. To the control group, we
 showed the “international Covid pass” policy, and to the first treatment group we replicated the “status quo”
 treatment from the previous experiment. To the second treatment group, we leveraged the “peer effect,” telling
 respondents that only one third of Americans oppose immunity passports for international travel. Finally, we
 exposed the fourth group to both these treatments at once.

 We observe that both nudges are effective in increasing the support for the pass, and they do not fuel vaccine
 hesitancy. Furthermore, we observe that their combined impact is stronger than any of them individually. In the
 case of vaccine passports, this suggests that policymakers would be well advised to use both these nudges
 simultaneously. Indeed, the finding that these two nudges are weakly addictive suggests that they could also be
 used in other policy areas.

 This post represents the views of the authors and not those of the COVID-19 blog, nor LSE.

 This post is based on Guidi, Sebastian and Romano, Alessandro and Sotis, Chiara, Depolarizing the COVID-19
 Vaccine Passport (May 20, 2021). Yale Law Journal, Forthcoming, and Sotis, Chiara, Alessandro Romano, Renny
 Reyes, and Miriam Allena. 2021. “Covid-19 Vaccine Passport and International Traveling: The Combined Effect of
 Two Nudges on Americans’ Support for the Pass.” PsyArXiv. July 13. doi:10.31234/osf.io/dr75j

Date originally posted: 2021-07-19
Permalink: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/covid19/2021/07/19/how-can-the-public-be-persuaded-to-accept-vaccine-passports/
Blog homepage: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/covid19/